Monthly Archives: October 2014

Jokes You Can Use:

One has the paws before the claws and the other has the clause before the pause.

What’s the best or fastest way to tune a banjo?

With wirecutters.

What could you call the small rivers that flow into the Nile?

Juveniles.

Heard about the math teacher with constipation? Worked it out with a pencil.

A chicken walks into a library, goes up to a librarian and says, “Book book book.” The librarian decides that the chicken wants a book so he gives the chicken a book and the chicken walks away. About ten minutes later the chicken comes back with the book, looking a bit agitated, saying, “Book book book.” The librarian decides the chicken wants another book so he takes the old book back and gives the chicken another book. The chicken walks out the door. Ten minutes later the chicken comes back again, very agitated, saying, “Book book book!” so quickly it almost sounds like one word. The chicken puts the book on the librarian’s desk and looks up – waiting for another book. This time the librarian gives the chicken another book and decides that something weird is happening. He follows the chicken out the door and into the park, all the way to the pond. In the pond is a frog sitting on a lily pad. The chicken gives the book to the the frog, who then says, “Reddit, reddit.”

Middle School Science Minute

I was recently reading the September, 2014 issue of “Science Scope,” a magazine written for middle school science teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.

In this issue, I read the “Editor’s Roundtable: Cause and Effect,” written by Inez Liftig, Editor of Science Scope. In the roundtable, she shares her thoughts and the research which supports that the teaching of cause and effect cannot be an afterthought in instruction; it must be considered an integral part of lesson planning integrated seamlessly with other dimensions of a lesson.

Strategies:

Google Search Tips

Resources:

Try the New Add-ons for Google Forms

Applications for Education

The Form Limiter Add-on mentioned above is useful for delivering timed assessments. Form Limiter can also be used to close the form when you a designated number of submissions have been made. That option is useful when you’re using Google Forms to create capped registration lists.

gMath for Google Forms is another that teachers will find useful. gMath allows you create and insert graphs and mathematical expressions into your Google Forms. That feature is one that math teachers have wanted for years.

Jokes You Can Use:

Everybody should pay their taxes with a smile, said Bob. “I tried it but they wanted cash.”

Wife: “There’s trouble with the car. It has water in the carburetor.”

Husband: “Water in the carburetor? That’s ridiculous.”

Wife: “I tell you the car has water in the carburetor.”

Husband: “You don’t even know what a carburetor is. Where’s the car?”

Wife: “In the swimming pool.”

A girl walks into a supermarket and asks the clerk,” Can I have a turkey for my grandma?” the clerk responds,” Sorry. We don’t do exchanges.”

CHICAGO CUBS VIRUS: Your PC makes frequent mistakes and comes in last in the reviews, but you still love it.

AT&T VIRUS: Every three minutes it tells you what great service you are getting.

MCI VIRUS: Every three minutes it reminds you that you’re paying too much for the AT&T virus.

PBS VIRUS: Your programs stop every few minutes to ask for money.

ELVIS VIRUS: Your computer gets fat, slow and lazy, then self destructs; only to resurface at shopping malls and service stations across rural America.

PAUL REVERE VIRUS: This revolutionary virus does not horse around. It warns you of impending hard disk attack—once if by LAN, twice if by C:>

A butcher saw a Lawyer passing by his shop one day, and asked him: Atty., what would you do if a dog came in and stole your meat? Lawyer replied: why? of course, I’ll make the owner pay for it! The butcher said: If that is so, now you owe me $15 because it is your dog. The Lawyer replied: very well, just deduct the $15 from the $25 you owe me for the advice, I’ll collect the remaining $10 the next time I pass by here.

Eileen Award:

Advisory:

10 Amazing Bets

Middle School Science Minute

MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE MINUTE-CUSTODIAL SCIENCE TRAINING

I was recently reading the September, 2014 issue of “Science Scope,” a magazine written for middle school science teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.

In this issue, I read an article entitled “Scope on Safety,” written by Ken Roy, Director of Environmental Health and Safety for the Glastonbury Public Schools in Glastonbury, CT. Within this article is the “Question of the Month.” This month’s question is, “Do custodians need safety training prior to cleaning the floors in a science lab?”

A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days – a sobering lesson learned

Resources:

Schools told: cash bribes ‘fail to improve GCSE grades’

Schools are wasting thousands of pounds each year attempting to bribe pupils to try harder in exams, according to government-funded research.

In the biggest study of its kind, it was claimed that promising children cash rewards in exchange for higher levels of attendance, behaviour and homework led to increased effort in the classroom.

But the use of incentives had little “direct impact” on pupils’ ability to learn and failed to actually improve their GCSE scores in core academic subjects, it emerged.

The conclusions raise serious questions over tactics employed by schools across Britain that spend tens of thousands of pounds each year on elaborate reward schemes.

One popular scheme – Vivo Miles – allows pupils to accumulate points for good work and behaviour before cashing them in for rewards such as iPods, iTunes vouchers, digital watches, bike equipment and clothes.

It is used by around 500 secondary schools in the UK, with more than nine-in-10 saying it has aided academic performance and improved student motivation and behaviour.

Many parents also make similar promises, with a survey this summer suggesting that 38 per cent of pupils were offered cash incentives by mothers and fathers. This includes those promised laptops, holidays and even cars.

“The study suggests that while incentives can increase effort in the classroom, their direct impact on learning is low. “

When Cody Swanek was told by his math teacher to take a certain algebra problem and convert it into a story, the 8th-grader dug deep into his knowledge of the Star Wars universe and wrote the most epic possible math question.

A surprising new argument against using kids’ test scores to grade their teachers

When a teacher whose students do well on tests moves to a school where test scores were improving the previous year, and average scores continue improving after that teacher arrives, it is hard to know how much of that continued improvement is due to the new teacher and how much to other factors.

This dispute is just one example of the mathematical acrobatics required to isolate the effect of one teacher on their students’ test scores, when so many other factors inside and outside the school’s walls affect how students perform.

A school teacher asked her primary six class to construct sentences with the words: defeat, detail, defense.

There was a pause before a pupil raised his hand and said he could make a sentence with them; “The cow jumped over defense and detail went over defeat.”

A distraught older woman is looking at herself in the mirror and crying. Her voice shakes as she says to her husband, “I’m so old. I’m so fat. I look horrible. I really need a compliment.”

Her husband, determined to quickly give his beloved the comfort she needs, exclaims, “Well, you have good eyesight!”

I intend to live forever – so far, so good.

In Australia, a race was proclaimed, with a huge payoff for the winner. The one stipulation was that only ostriches were allowed to run the race. A fellow decided to enter, but not having an ostrich, and hearing that the fastest ostrich in the world was the mascot of the local police department, he stole the bird and entered the race. As luck would have it, when the pistol shot went off to start the race, the ostrich buried its head in the sand and the fellow lost the race.

16 Shakespearean Insults

Breakfast

Children all over the world eat cornflakes and drink chocolate milk, of course, but in many places they also eat things that would strike the average American palate as strange, or worse.

“The idea that children should have bland, sweet food is a very industrial presumption,” says Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University who grew up in India. “In many parts of the world, breakfast is tepid, sour, fermented and savory.”

Middle School Science Minute

I was recently reading the September, 2014 issue of “Science Scope,” a magazine written for middle school science teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.

In this issue, I read an article entitled “Moving Ahead With Alternate Conceptions,” written by Aaron Isabelle, Rosemary Millham, and Thais da Cunha. In the article, they explain how alternate conceptions are also referred to as misconceptions, which are deeply ingrained, scientifically inappropriate ideas about something in the physical or natural world. In the article, they state 11 alternate conceptions correlated with the NGSS. An example of an alternate conception is that dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same time.

Strategies:

Homework

A brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study — and a reminder of the importance of doing just that: reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers themselves.

First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school. In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement. If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.

Second, even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn’t been particularly persuasive.

It’s easy to miss one interesting result in this study that appears in a one-sentence aside. When kids in these two similar datasets were asked how much time they spent on math homework each day, those in the NELS study said 37 minutes, whereas those in the ELS study said 60 minutes.

it was statistically significant but “very modest”: Even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours’ worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test.

There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”

The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.

you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school. The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.

many people will respond to these results by repeating platitudes about the importance of practice[8], or by complaining that anyone who doesn’t think kids need homework is coddling them and failing to prepare them for the “real world” (read: the pointless tasks they’ll be forced to do after they leave school).

National Cyber Safety Month

ScratchJR

Coding is the new literacy! With ScratchJr, young children (ages 5-7) can program their own interactive stories and games. In the process, they learn to solve problems, design projects, and express themselves creatively on the computer.

Web Spotlight:

Mute the Messenger

When Dr. Walter Stroup showed that Texas’ standardized testing regime is ﬂawed, the testing company struck back.by Jason Stanford Published on Wednesday, September 3, 2014, at 8:00 CST

“Rigor” was the new watchword in education policy.

Testing advocates believed that more rigorous curricula and tests would boost student achievement—the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory. But that’s not how it worked out.

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott, long an advocate of using tests to hold schools accountable, broke from orthodoxy when he called the STAAR test a “perversion of its original intent.”

To his credit, Committee Chair Rob Eissler began the hearing by posing a question that someone should have asked a generation ago: What exactly are we getting from these tests?

Stroup sat down at the witness table and offered the scientific basis behind the widely held suspicion that what the tests measured was not what students have learned but how well students take tests.

his testimony to the committee broke through the usual assumption that equated standardized testing with high standards. He reframed the debate over accountability by questioning whether the tests were the right tool for the job. The question wasn’t whether to test or not to test, but whether the tests measured what we thought they did.

Stroup argued that the tests were working exactly as designed

Stroup had caught the government using a bathroom scale to measure a student’s height.

The scale wasn’t broken or badly made. The scale was working exactly as designed. It was just the wrong tool for the job. The tests, Stroup said, simply couldn’t measure how much students learned in school.

Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock (R-Killeen) brought Stroup’s testimony to a close with a joke that made it perfectly clear. “I’d like to have you and someone from Pearson have a little debate,” Aycock said. “Would you be willing to come back?”

“Sure,” Stroup said. “I’ll come back and mud wrestle.”

Stroup had picked a fight with a special interest in front of politicians. The winner wouldn’t be determined by reason and science but by politics and power.

Pearson’s real counterattack took place largely out of public view, where the company attempted to discredit Stroup’s research. Instead of a public debate, Pearson used its money and influence to engage in the time-honored academic tradition of trashing its rival’s work and career behind his back.

standardized tests have become the pre-eminent yardstick of classroom learning in America, and Pearson is selling the most yardsticks.

Stroup started asking after he thought he found a way to use cloud computing to expose poor, minority children to basic math concepts using calculus.

The same kids branded as failures by the state tests embraced the project, using the cloud technology collaboratively to learn basic math concepts. This was the breakthrough that everybody—Kress, Perot and lawmakers in Austin—had been looking for.

However, the students’ scores rose only 10 percent, a statistically valid variance but hardly the change that he had observed in the classroom.

Using UT’s computing power, Stroup investigated. He entered the state test scores for every child in Texas, and out came the same minor variances he had gotten in Dallas. What he noticed was that most students’ test scores remained the same no matter what grade the students were in, or what subject was being tested. According to Stroup’s initial calculations, that constancy accounted for about 72 percent of everyone’s test score. Regardless of a teacher’s experience or training, class size, or any other classroom-based factor Stroup could identify, student test scores changed within a relatively narrow window of about 10 to 15 percent.

Stroup knew from his experience teaching impoverished students in inner-city Boston, Mexico City and North Texas that students could improve their mastery of a subject by more than 15 percent in a school year, but the tests couldn’t measure that change. Stroup came to believe that the biggest portion of the test scores that hardly changed—that 72 percent—simply measured test-taking ability. For almost $100 million a year, Texas taxpayers were sold these tests as a gauge of whether schools are doing a good job. Lawmakers were using the wrong tool.

The paradox of Texas’ grand experiment with standardized testing is that the tests are working exactly as designed from a psychometric (the term for the science of testing) perspective, but their results don’t show what policymakers think they show.

Stroup concluded that the tests were 72 percent “insensitive to instruction,” a graduate- school way of saying that the tests don’t measure what students learn in the classroom.

After correcting what Pearson interpreted as the mislabeled column, Way wrote, the tests were “only 50 percent” insensitive to instruction.

This alone was a startling admission. Even if you accepted Pearson’s argument that Stroup had erred, here was the company selling Texas millions of dollars’ worth of tests admitting that its product couldn’t measure half of what happens in a classroom.

A student in the third grade did as well on a math test as that same student did in the eighth grade on a language arts test as the same student did in the 10th grade on a different test. Regardless of changes in school, subject and teacher, a student could count on a test result remaining 50 to 72 percent unchanged no matter what. Stroup hypothesized that the tests were so insensitive to instruction that a test could switch out a science question for a math question without having any effect on how that student would score.

“teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores,” largely confirming Stroup’s apparently controversial conclusion.

If it’s true that the test measured primarily students’ ability to take a test, then, Stroup reasoned to the House Public Education Committee in June 2012, “it is rational game theory strategy to target the 72 percent.” That means more Pearson worksheets and fewer field trips, more multiple-choice literary analysis and fewer book reports, and weeks devoted to practice tests and less classroom time devoted to learning new things. In other words, logic explained exactly what was going on in Texas’ public schools.

we end up with adults and professionals spending most of their time gaming the system.”

Rep. Eissler never called another hearing to have the debate between Stroup and a Pearson representative as Rep. Aycock had suggested. Eissler retired from the Legislature and now lobbies for Pearson.

Tax law allows corporations to establish charitable foundations. What tax law doesn’t allow is endowing a nonprofit to supplement the parent corporation’s profit-driven mission. Last December, Pearson paid a $7.7 million fine in New York state to settle charges that the Pearson Foundation “had helped develop products for its corporate parent, including course materials and software,” reported The New York Times.

“Recharge the optimism that made you an educator in the first place! School is where students and staff should feel safe, engaged, and productive – and choosing optimism is the first step toward restoring healthy interactions necessary for enacting real change.”

Jokes You Can Use:

A small 1 SEATER plane crashed into a cemetery. Police have recovered 102 bodies so far and will continue to dig throughout the night.

There was a student who was desirous of taking admission for a study course.

He was smart enough to get through the written test, a GD and was to appear for the personal interview. Later, as the interview progressed, the interviewer found this boy to be bright since he could answer all the questions correctly. The interviewer got impatient and decided to corner the boy.

“Tell me your choice;” said he to the boy, “What’s your choice: I shall either ask you ten easy questions or ONE real difficult. Think well before you make up your mind.”

The boy thought for a while and said, “My choice is ONE real difficult question.”

“Well, good luck to you, you have made your own choice!” said the man on the opposite side. Tell me: What comes first, Day or Night?”

The boy was jolted first but he waited for a while and said: “It’s the DAY, sir.”

“How???????” the interviewer was smiling (“At last, I got you!” he said to himself.)

“Sorry sir, you promised me that you will not ask me a SECOND difficult question!”

Middle School Science Minute

New Middle School Science Minute Podcast on “Green Pennies”

I was recently reading the Summer, 2014 issue of “Science Scope,” a magazine written for middle school science teachers, published by the National Science Teachers Association.

In this issue, I read an article entitled “Why the Statue of Liberty is Green: Coatings, Corrosion and Patina,” written by Richard H. Moyer and Susan A. Everett. In this 5E-learning-cycle lesson, students test different types of coatings on pennies to observe how the coatings affect the amount of corrosion produced when the penny is placed in a moist environment and a moist, acidic environment.

Strategies:

Jeopardy Rocks!

Really easy to create and save Jeopardy style board. You just give them a Title for the board (end of the URL), email address and create a password. Then click and type. Easy peasy. Note that you must complete the entire board before the “Publish” button is available. There are six columns. Each column needs five questions. You also need a Final Jeopardy question.

Google Forms

Google has updated Google Forms to include a couple of nice options. First of all, you can now limit respondents to one response. Secondly, you can now shuffle question order. Thirdly, you can now customize the images and fonts in a form. You can do a lot of good stuff with Forms.

PopSonnet

Resources:

Inside the Brain of a Struggling Reader [Infographic]

When a student struggles to learn to read, we often look to social or economic factors, access to books, or the home environment for an explanation. While each of these factors can play a part, treatable brain differences are often part of the equation.

Richard Byrne Google Docs Resources

Sources of Free Sound Effects and Music for Multimedia Projects

Just as with images, it is important to have students use music and sound effects that they have permission to use. The following resources offer music and sound effects that students can use for free in multimedia projects.